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By Roxana HegemanAssociated Press • Tuesday October 8, 2013 1:23 AM

WICHITA, Kan. — When Tim Peterson finished planting his 900 acres of winter wheat last week, the
usually market-savvy Kansas farmer unexpectedly found himself struggling to make critical marketing
decisions without access to vital agricultural reports.

The reports are casualties of the federal-government shutdown.

“We have no clue what is going on in the market,” said Peterson, who farms near Monument in
northwestern Kansas. He typically protects his investment in seed and fertilizer by “locking in”
the price his wheat crop will fetch in July with a futures contract. Such contracts shield farmers
from market fluctuations by guaranteeing a price while the crop is in the ground.

Farmers and livestock producers use the reports put out by the National Agriculture Statistics
Service to make decisions — such as how to price crops, which commodities to grow and when to sell
them — as well as track cattle-auction prices. Not only has the statistics service stopped putting
out reports about demand, supply, exports and prices, but all websites with past information have
been taken down.

“It is causing a direct void in information that is immediate,” Peterson said.

This worries him far more than his other problem: When will his $20,000 subsidy check from the
government, which usually comes in October, arrive?

Since the U.S. Agriculture Department’s local farm-services offices also have been shuttered,
farmers can’t apply for loans, sign up land for government programs or receive government checks
for programs they are enrolled in. And at a time when researchers who are seeking new wheat
varieties and plant traits should be planting experimental plots, all work has halted.

Donn Teske, president of the Kansas Farmers Union, is a grower in Wheaton in the northeastern
part of the state. He is worried about payments he is owed for idling environmentally sensitive
land under the Conservation Reserve Program.

“I always look forward to that check coming in the mail,” the 58-year-old said.

But all of that, farmers said, pales in comparison with the lack of agriculture reports, because
farmers today depend far more on global marketplaces than government payouts.

The reports, for instance, can alert them to shortfalls in foreign markets or whether there’s a
wide swing in acres planted, both of which would prompt U.S. growers to plant extra crops to meet
those demands, or hang onto a harvest longer to get a better price.

“That information is worth a lot of money, a lot more than $20,000 a year,” Peterson said, a
reference to his subsidy.

Major commodity players can pay “private sources” for crop-size estimates that usually are
provided in the statistics service’s reports, said Dalton Henry, director of governmental affairs
for the industry group Kansas Wheat. “Producers aren’t going to have that same luxury,” he
said.

During the shutdown, the USDA won’t provide sales reports from Oklahoma livestock auctions that
are used to help set prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, said Jack Carson of the Oklahoma
Department of Agriculture. “We are working. They are not,” he said.